At BetterRide we define winning while mountain biking as doing your personal best. Not just showing up to ride but doing the best you can on any given day. I learned this when I coached for the Steamboat Spring Winter Sports Club. Despite coaching more Olympians that any other city in America the SSWSC defined winning as, “Doing your personal best”. The wise coaches who shaped the SSWSC understood that 99% of their athletes were never going to make a living at the sport and there were bigger things to be taught than just coming in 1st place. This is a great lesson for life too. If you do your best at what ever you are doing (working, playing, learning, etc.) you will be satisfied and happy. If you slack off you will be disappointed, it really is that simple.

Our Mountain Biking Students Doing Their Best

Mountain biking can be very competitive, even those who have never raced and probably never will. Many mountain bikers compete to have the best bike, many group rides turn into the Wednesday Night World Championships, strava is all about competing and then of course there is actual mountain bike racing. The thing is, we can’t control other riders, they might be more skilled, more fit, more determined, etc. but we can control our own performance. If you give it your honest best shot, you should be happy with your performance, no matter how you did. An example from my life comes from snowboard racing. Back in 1991 my behavior confused a few of my friends/competitors, one weekend I won the race and was visibly disappointed and the next weekend I got second place and was elated. A few friends said, “Gene, I don’t understand it. You won last weekend and looked frustrated and this weekend you got beat but look really happy!” I had to explain to them I don’t race to win, I race to push myself, learn and improve. The first weekend I won but I didn’t ride my best. In other words, I got lucky, my competitors didn’t ride their best either. The following weekend, even though I took second place I had the best run of my life! It was amazing, to this day it was my best athletic performance of my life. “But you got beat my Del”, one of my friends said. I remember my reply, “Del, is god! I had the best run of my life and Del smoked me! Did you see my run?! It was amazing! I booted every gate (meaning I went so straight that the only thing going around the gate was my board, my boots hit every gate)! That was the best run of my life!”

What I can’t understand is people who are okay with not doing their best. They spend 4, 6, 10 thousand dollars on a bike yet are okay riding way below what they are capable of. A restaurant manager years ago told me, “Gene, whether you are a janitor or president of the US, if you do your job to the best of your ability you will go home satisfied”. To this day that might of been the best advice I have ever received.

Stop comparing yourself to other and just focus on being the best you can be. You don’t need a carbon bike or a carbon wheelset (and neither of those will make you happy) what you need to do is focus on being the best you can be, that will always lead to happiness. When I turned pro at 29 I actually thought I could make a living at it. I quickly realized most of my competitors were younger, fitter (I have asthma) and more experienced I wasn’t likely going to make it to the top of the sport. That didn’t dampen my enthusiasm though, I loved pushing myself to see how close I could come to the best in the world. Be realistic and set performance goals not outcome goals as you can’t control how others perform but you can control how well you perform! Be your best and nothing else matters. Doing your best while mountain biking, winning!

Fear, the killer! Fear is a topic we deal with a lot in our skills camps. Even with new and/or greatly improved skills from our camp fear can still hold you back. With this in mind I will share some ways we help our students manage their fear while mountain biking. Fear does have a purpose and it isn’t always a bad thing, appropriate fear (fear that keeps you from doing something you lack the skill to do safely) can keep you safe and save you from injury! We are going to focus on inappropriate fear (fear that is either based in fantasy or fear that doesn’t equal the risk at hand).

You can see from body position I was a little scared here (my weight is a hair too far back instead of being centered) and on King Kong trail a little fear keeps you safe! A lot of fear would of probably caused me to crash.

Of course skill is the number one factor in overcoming fear, imagine our students who race World Cup downhills like National Champions Luca Cometti, Mitch Ropelato and Jackie Harmony riding your local trails. I doubt they would be scared of that section that scares you on your local trail (as World Cup Tracks are gnarly!). They have worked hard on ingraining the correct riding techniques so they are riding in balance and in control consistently so while they may have less “nerve” than you they have great skill. I’m not trying to sell our coaching though, here are some ways to overcome fear with the skill you currently possess.

1. Go at your own pace and take “baby steps” when progressing. Taking a big leap over your comfort zone is not a good way to learn. Have you ever been goaded into doing something that you felt was way above your skill level? Even if you make it you often don’t feel like you have gotten better, you feel like you got lucky. Feeling, “Holy cow, I nearly died, that was sketchy!” does not make you feel confident! If you don’t make it, the crash will often set you back, decreasing your confidence and raising your level of fear. So be gentle with yourself and progress at a pace that is comfortable to you.

2. Focus on what you want to do, not what you don’t want to do. This sounds simple but pays off big. Our brains don’t understand “not” and “don’t” very well. If you are focusing on not falling your brain has to focus on the concept of falling and then quickly try to refocus on “not” doing what you are thinking about. It is much easier to focus on “getting to that tree” or “ride this section smooth and light” than telling yourself “don’t fall”.

2.5 Ride that trail with confidence! Focusing on not falling does not put you in a confident state and studies have shown that we become less coordinated as our confidence drops. As I have stated in previous blog posts mountain biking is an offensive sport! This means we should always ride on the offense or get off and walk! Mountain biking defensively will get you hurt as you are focusing on what you don’t want to do and you are less coordinated.

3. Live to ride another day! If you are more focused on “not falling” than you are on getting to where you are going, get off your bike and walk that section. Who knows you might go right through it the next time when you are more warmed up and/or focused.

After/while walking that section figure out what about that section is scaring you then “baby step” your way up to doing it.

Example: If a four-foot drop on an exposed trail is scaring you find a one foot drop with no exposure, get really good a hitting that, work your way up to a four-foot drop with no exposure, then an exposed trail with a one foot drop working all the way to a four-foot drop on an exposed trail. This builds on a series of successes, increasing your confidence!

4. Breathe, relax, breathe and smile it is just a bike ride. Breathing and smiling releases tension which improves our balance, coordination and confidence. I mean deep, belly breathes from your diaphragm which are very calming. Smiling releases endorphins which relax you. The simple act of lifting the corners of your mouth, even if it is a grimace will release those endorphins and relax you!

7. As you improve make sure you update your self concept to match. Remember that the past doesn’t equal the future. You may have wrecked or not made a section last week/month but if your skills have improved since then the section may be easier for you now.

Example: We used used to race down the Porcupine Rim climb in Moab (from Lazy Man’s to the stock tanks) and there was a section most of us referred to as “the Gnarly Section”. It was a two foot rock drop into a field of “baby head” rocks and ledges. When I first raced it in 1994 on a hardtail with a 1.5″ travel Mag 20 fork it was kind of gnarly! By 1998 my bike had gone from hardtail to 6″ of travel front and rear and I had ridden that track over 50 times and raced it 10 times (we got two race runs back then!). On my first race run in 1998, I railed the corner before that section and said to myself, “here comes the gnarly section”, what do think saying that made me do? If you guessed, “tense up and slow down a little bit” you are correct! After that run it occurred to me that I had ridden that section at least 61 times and never crashed in it. If you can ride something cleanly 61 times out of 61 attempts is it really gnarly? I realized my bike had gotten way better and I had become way more confident a rider so why did I fear this section and call it “the gnarly section”? I decided to change the name of the section to, “that fun rocky section”, which, on my 6″ travel Yeti Lawwill it was! On my second run, as I railed that corner and said, “here comes the fun rocky section” do you think I slowed down and tensed up? No, I smiled, relaxed and probably snuck in a few pedal strokes!

So, don’t do what I did for five years, failing to update my self-image as a rider. As you improve make a conscious effort to raise your self-image as a rider!

BetterRide Coach and National Champion Jackie Harmony experiences fear too, she just as more confidence than most riders so it takes a tougher trail for fear to affect her.

7. Wear knee pads and elbow pads when practicing a tough section are learning a new skill. I have found that having padding on really increases your confidence when learning or trying to push your limits. As a matter of fact I never ride without knee pads anymore, knees are too valuable and easily damaged!

8. Debunk your fear/s. Is your fear realistic? Often fear is not based in reality and when we realize this the fear goes away.

Example: I was working with a pro downhill racer on calming his pre-race nerves and I kept asking him, “why are you nervous?”, finally after four of five answers that couldn’t be the main cause of his nerves he said, “I don’t want to let my wife and kids down.” I then asked, “so you doing well in a bike race is really important to your wife and kids? If you do poorly they will lose respect for you and love you less?” He laughed and said something like, “no, my wife and kids see how hard I train and want me to do well but I’m pretty sure they don’t base their love for me on how well I race my bike.” When we got him to bring this fear into the light he realized it was completely made up and he was putting a lot of unnecessary pressure on himself. After this he still got nervous before a race but the appropriate amount, enough to give him energy but not hurt his performance.

9. Learn from your mistakes. If you mess up or wreck do your best to figure out why it happened and correct that mistake or improve your technique so it will not happen again.

Start Not Stopping Yourself: Lessons From Mountain Bike Camp

Why’d this Iowa girl up and drive 16 hours to mountain bike camp in Colorado? I didn’t know in any specific way – I just knew. It was easy to trust with all the kismet that blasted me there. Check it:

I just knew that if I didn’t act on that conversation on April Fool’s Day with my bike buddy Dave, I’d be a fool. I just knew that a dude-heavy edition of the camp Dave recommended in May in Des Moines didn’t exactly have my name written all over it. I just knew that the women-only edition of the same camp taking place in Colorado’s McInnis Canyons three weeks away did have my name written all over it. I just knew that the one spot left was mine. I just knew I’d have enough range of motion in my recently repaired broken elbow to ride dirty. I just knew I had to bag on the yoga conference I had scheduled the same weekend, and that I had to tell them the truth when I asked for a refund: “Yeah, so the Universe wants me to go to this mountain bike camp, see…” For more please go to hear blog:

Whether you are self-taught and relatively new to riding or a veteran with skills coaching experience and years on your mountain bike you might be letting this issue hold you back. All the skills coaching, personal training and fitness coaching in the world will not allow us to reach our goals until we overcome this issue.

The number one issue holding you back from reaching your potential is your mind! Specifically self-limiting beliefs. We all have self-limiting beliefs, just some of us in areas that greatly affect achieving our most important goals and some of us are fortunate enough to have them in areas that only effect minor goals. I hear some of our students say these self-limiting beliefs out loud: “I stink at climbing!”, “I suck at descending but I’m good at …”, “I’m just not a natural” but often we are not even aware of these beliefs, they are in our subconscious. The interesting thing is that many times these self-limiting beliefs are completely unfounded! That’s right, quite often the thing holding you back has no basis in reality.

Any belief that holds you back is a self-limiting belief. When your subconscious says, “I am not good enough” that is a self-limiting belief. Sometimes they actually start out positive “I can do that well but I never will be as good as ….” but in the end they set a limit to your achievement/performance.

They are often caused by failing at something (as you may or may not know I believe that, “failure is a nature and necessary part of the learning process” quote from Dan Millman). For instance, a former self-limiting belief I had was that I could not do a trackstand. One day a friend and I each tried to trackstand and I ended up falling over. For years after this when asked if I could trackstand I would reply, “no, I can not trackstand” and for years I couldn’t trackstand. Was this limitation real? Of course not, looking back on that day I fell over trying to trackstand I realized I did a trackstand for five, possibly ten seconds before I feel over but I guess my goal was an hour are so, so in my mind I failed. One day I decided I would try using baby steps (working my way from 1 second trackstands to 20-30 second trackstands) and in less than an hour I was doing ten second trackstands consistently.

Don’t let self-limiting beliefs keep you from riding at your best! I don’t, even at 49!

From discussing self-limiting beliefs with our students it seems like society is often to blame. A parent, a teacher, an older sibling, a teammate, anyone whose opinion you respected may have had set something that is holding you back. In my case, when I was seven or eight I came home crying because I didn’t make the baseball team and my mom, trying to comfort me said, “honey, you’re just not a natural athlete but you are so much smarter than those boys. You’re IQ is ….”. Not exactly what a seven-year old wants to hear! At the US Snowboarding Championships in 1992 I remember looking over at my competitor in the dual slalom quarter finals and thinking, “holy cow, look at the size of his legs! He is a natural athlete, what am I doing here, I am not a natural like him.” Not exactly the best thing to be thinking right before a race! I actually ended up beating him, barely but, I got eliminated in the next round. Can you imagine how much better I would have raced if I had thought, “wow, look at the over developed legs on that guy, to bad he doesn’t have my skill, I am going to smoke him!” With that much more positive self-belief I just might have one the competition!

How to do you stop this often subconscious self-defeating cycle? Step one is to identify the belief, “I am a good rider but will never be great” or the most misguided one I heard the other day, “I only weigh 140 so I don’t have the muscle mass to climb like the bigger guys” (this is misguided because in general the lighter you are the better climber you are, most great climbers are short and stick thin). Once you have identified the belief check to find the source of the belief and see if it is real. Where did the belief come from? Does it make sense? Is there proof that the belief is true? Once you have these questions answered you can create a strategy to rid yourself of the belief. If the belief was caused by a past failure tell yourself, the past doesn’t equal the future and correctly practice doing the skill/section of trail that you felt you couldn’t do. If it has no basis in reality (your friend said, “wow you suck at descending” 10 years ago) tell yourself, “that was ten years ago, I now understand body position and vision better, my bike is way better and I have the skill to descend much better now”. Often you will find that once you identify a self-limiting belief you laugh, realize that it is preposterous and you move past it.